Previous to huffing napalm & declaring it a lovely morning for death & victory, Robert Duvall was being beaten by robot cops. He’s a nameless, shaved head cog in the hamster wheel of production & consumption within a nightmarish dystopian future brought to you by the one and only George Lucas.

Before Lucas started making features that leaned on Joseph Campbell, Flash Gordon, and a more populous approach to storytelling, he made this sci-fi, art film. This was Lucas’ first feature which was based on a earlier short made during film school. THX 1138 drops you into a futuristic world without much of a set-up at all beside a Flash Gordon trailer to show that the future will likely not be what we expect when it arrives. In this regard, Lucas is a fucking genius. He was right than and he’s right now.

Star Wars was a film which became the new financial watermark for so many movie studios. Ironically enough, Lucasfilm (pre-Disney purchase) was the maker of some of the most expensive, massive independent films. Wrapping your arms around the plots of a Star Wars film is less nuanced then science fiction from Tarkovsky or Kubrick, but I’m no Star Wars apologist. There are some major foibles in the huge story, stretching across the canvas of nine movies, but they are hard not to love. If you want to see some of the outlines of the storytelling & filmmaking process, go watch THX 1138.

Highly recommend you smoke a bit as getting lost is more of symptom to an entire film that is so mighty white. Speaking of, wouldn’t Duvall make a great Biden to Alec Baldwin’s Trump?